The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
At present there is a growing interest in monitoring the operation of airborne mobile platforms, for example commercial aircraft, while such aircraft are on the ground operating at an airport or airfield, leaving the airport during a take-off or approaching the airport during a landing operation. The International Civil Aviation Organization identifies a runway incursion as “any occurrence at an aerodrome involving the incorrect presence of an aircraft, vehicle or person on the protected area of a surface designated for the landing and take-off of aircraft.” The FAA has adopted the ICAO definition as “any unauthorized intrusion onto a runway, regardless of whether or not an aircraft presents a potential conflict.” In addition, the FAA defines an “Excursion” as when “an aircraft uncontrollably leaves a runway end, or side, usually during landing, but also during takeoffs, especially following an abort.” A “Confusion” incident is defined as an incident involving a single aircraft when the aircraft makes “the unintentional use of the wrong runway, taxiway, or airport surface for landing or take-off.”
As such, monitoring is important to prevent accidental incursions, excursions and confusion when multiple aircraft are attempting to use runways or taxi areas. Such systems attempt to provide timely advisories to the flight crew during taxi, takeoff, final approach, landing and rollout. This added situational awareness helps pilots avoid runway incursion and other kinds of on-ground accidents.
Limitations of solutions for monitoring and detecting incursions and excursions of aircraft at an airport include creation of excessive false alerts for possible incursion detection. Furthermore, all possible incursions may not be covered and are geometry constrained to provide only limited prediction of incursions based on speed or time (first order effects). For example, solution performance parameters presently being considered by the FAA SC-186 WG 1 committee are based on geometric airport surface relationships and arbitrarily chosen rules, boundaries, and performance attributes. For example a runway is assumed to be a 3-D box that extends three miles beyond the ends of the runway, 600-1500 feet to the sides of the runway centerline and 1000 feet above the runway surface. Only aircraft reported in the box are analyzed and aircraft movement within the box is estimated by either time to an event or speed (not velocity or acceleration) of an aircraft.
Solutions may not take into account actual aircraft dynamics or are restricted to collisions (not excursions), and are totally dependent on the airport surface geometry for calculating incursion potential. Still further, solutions that attempt to monitor and detect aircraft incursions and excursions are often scenario based and in many cases rely on the completeness of scenarios to judge whether incursions may or may not happen.